Permission Marketing

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Poke The Box

The latest book, Poke The Box is a call to action about the initiative you're taking - in your job or in your life, and Seth once again breaks the traditional publishing model by releasing it through The Domino Project.

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THE DIP BLOG by Seth Godin

All Marketers Are Liars Blog

This is a true story of the Net, of talent and trust. It's a small world.

Fifteen years ago, on the streets of Soho (the artsy district of Manhattan) my wife and I were window-shopping for art we couldn't afford. Outside of one of the galleries, literally on the street, we saw an artist selling his work right on the street. We bought a painting for about $100 and congratulated ourselves for "buying art in Soho" at a discount. The artist was friendly and we wished him luck.

Knut Masco, the artist, specialized in painting on the back of old windows. He decorated the wooden frame and painted on the glass. He was a committed street artist and made a name for himself when he joined in with some other artists and sued Rudi Guiliani for banning their work (a surprisingly large number of people don't remember the original bully version of Guiliani). They won and that was the last we heard of Knut.

Anyway, two months ago the Masco in our house fell off the wall and shattered into a billion pieces. We were heartbroken. "This is a job for google" I cried, and off I went to find Knut. Nothing doing. He had vanished.

I hopped over to the amazing Google Answers. I posted a query and within a day, the researcher found Knut... living in Israel... under another name... no longer doing art!

I dropped Knut a note, found out his new name was Boaz, and described our need for a new painting. He quickly agreed--even though he couldn't find any old windows and had to make a new one from scratch. Even though he hadn't painted in a while. I offered to pay in advance, but he wouldn't hear of it.

Two months later, I get an email saying the painting is ready and has been shipped. I send him a check, made out to his new name, on faith. A day later, a painting arrives by Federal Express. From Israel. With a handwritten invoice.

The painting is terrific--even better than the original. But more important to us is the story. Not sure what you can do with it, but thought you'd want to hear it.

I think it's worth noting that there are more than ten million blogs out there, and best as I can tell, virtually nobody does it because they have to. In other words, it's not a job yet. I'm sure it will be soon, for some people.

I post it becausea. the site is beautiful and clear and is a great example of the sort of Knock Knock website we need more of.b. more important, I think it represents a neat opportunity for marketers of content.

Example: Rickie Lee Jones says, "If 5,000 people agree to buy a new live album from me $10 a copy as an MP3, I'll go ahead and make it." She then promotes the sale and points people to Fundable.

If she doesn't get 5,000, everyone gets a refund, automatically. If she does, she sends out the album and something good has happened.

What's neat about this is that it creates a fundamentally different sort of buying mechanism. That hasn't happened in a long, long time.

I actually don't think that this is going to be a truly next big thing... it's too much work to do the promotion and to make something worth buying. (Imagine chartering a big jet to Las Vegas for a convention...) But it's a cool idea.

A year ago today, I started work on ChangeThis. The idea was to have a mechanism that would help thoughtful ideas spread. Far too lazy to do something this difficult on my own, I assembled a team of summer interns who did the entire thing.

It succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. We featured authors as diverse as Tom Peters, Amnesty International, Chris Anderson, Hugh Macleod, George Lakoff and Guy Kawaski. We distributed manifestos on the evil of juice and the joys of blogging. Millions and millions of copies of our pdf files were distributed far and wide.

ChangeThis, paradoxically, was too successful. As the bar was raised and the standards increased, the amount of work necessary to keep up the quality kept rising. Starting at the end of last year, I entered into a very long negotiation with a major web company about passing the reins on to them. Alas, as often happens with long negotiations with major corporations, it crashed and burned at the very end. One side effect is that ChangeThis has been relatively bereft of new content since February or so.

The good news?a. next week I hope to be able to tell you about a new team taking over--no money is changing hands, just a team of folks who want to do the hard work to make it fly...and b. we learned a lot. We learned a lot building it and launching it, and we learned a lot in watching what spread (and what didn't spread). And, I think, our millions of readers learned a lot.

So, think hard about the next generation of manifestos. Challenge yourself to write something that's important, and that will spread. More next week. Thanks for reading.

So, every single article about podcasting mentions Adam Curry (which makes sense, since it was his idea). And every article ever written about Adam Curry mentions that he was once an MTV VJ. For no good reason. (We're talking almost 100,000 google matches).

AND, every single article about Google (until recently) included the phrase, "And employees eat lunch in a cafeteria where the food is prepared by a former chef for the Grateful Dead." For no good reason. (We're talking 25,600 matches).

I thought about that when I was yelling on the cell phone today, because the connection was far worse than the way the phone in my house sounded in 1971.

And the typesetting on my blog doesn't compare to that in my books.

And my digital pictures in iphoto, though there are a lot of them, really don't look as sharp as these snapshots from my high school graduation (and I had more hair).

It's not just traditional media, either. An email doesn't communicate as much information as a meeting, and a voice mail is really hard to file. A Powerbar may have plenty of vitamins and stuff, but it's just not as good as a real meal, is it?

Which leaves a big opportunity. The opportunity to provide sensory richness. To deliver experiences that don't pale in comparison to the old stuff. It's not just baby boomer nostalgia (though that helps)--it's a human desire for texture.